»Until recently, reconciliation initiatives tended to ignore specialized harms of sexual violence suffered by women. At the urging of gender scholars and advocates, reconciliation initiatives started acknowledging the unique nature of sexual violence harms to women and began tailoring remedies to address these specialized harms. Yet, though a step in the right direction, even those forward-looking gender-sensitive initiatives have not specifically and forthrightly recognized the unique sexual violence harms to women of color.
Race and gender place women of color at the bottom of the social hierarchy, making them particularly vulnerable to sexual violence as part of mass injustice and later often rendering their injuries nearly invisible in the redress process. Yet their severe sexual violence harms are unique, ranging from irreparable reproductive damage, broken relationships, and economic hardship to stigma, isolation, and shame. Why do those fashioning redress tend to largely overlook or ignore these unique sexual violence harms to women of color?
This Article responds to this pressing question and modestly refines the recently developed intersectional race-gender redress analysis. It clarifies societal constructions of gender by focusing on one aspect as it intersects with race--sexual violence. The Article calls for a particularized intersectional racegender redress analysis to recognize sexual violence against women of color as uniquely worthy of redress.
Through a case study on Kenya's Mau Mau women and their unique harms, the Article employs this refined redress analysis and encourages scholars, frontline advocates, policymakers, and survivors and their families to strive for more comprehensive and enduring social healing "by doing justice" for both individual women of color and the polity itself. In doing so, it emphasizes that unveiling and making explicit any implicit intersectional racegender redress bias might significantly begin changing societal notions about who is worthy of redress.« (Source: Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice)